I have a friend in Manhattan who spends six months of every year in Tel Aviv and he tells me that in Israel ultra-orthodox Jews are looked down upon and ridiculed by the majority.

Indeed, as Bible teacher and missionary R. Dawson Barlow confirms in his 2005 book, The Apostasy of the Christian Church, “Today, those few devout Jews who still believe in a future coming of a personal Messiah are labeled as ‘ultra-orthodox’ and are dismissed as being ignorant, pompous, superstitious and unenlightened, by, you guessed it, their own people, i.e., the Jewish Community!

“The current Messianic concept of modern Judaism is echoed by Nathan Ausubel in his book (The Book of Jewish Knowledge). On page 286 he says:

It would be unrealistic to imagine in this scientific age . . . that all Jews still believe in a Messiah or that their conception of him is the same as their forefathers. More than a century ago, Joseph Perl, a leader of the Jewish enlightenment (said) ‘The truly educated Jews by no means picture the Messiah as a real personality. They see him only as a symbol of ideas of the redemption of Israel and of universal peace which await their realization when Israel, freed from all oppression, will be accepted into the family of nations.’

Mordecai Kaplan, of Jewish Theological Seminary in The United States, has observed that ‘To the (truly) educated modern person it is unthinkable that any human being, no matter how exalted in character or how richly endowed with intellectual powers, merits serving as the instrument of God’s intentions for bringing in the millennium on earth.’

Barlow reasons, “What a haughty display of an elitist attitude and an arrogant sense of self-importance. The exact same attitude exists in the professing ‘Christian’ community where a modern theologian is only seen to be truly educated if he is ‘adequately’ conversant with the ‘documentary hypothesis’ and the views of the Nicene ‘fathers,’ usually referred to as the Patristic Theologians, who wrote before, during, and after the famed Council of Nicea (325 AD).

“They must also be cognizant of the views of a number of modern contemporary theologians. All this is required of the ‘truly educated’ theologian. The fact that they are for all practical purposes ignorant to the glory of the rightly divided Word, and especially the revelation of the mystery revealed to Paul, is of no consequence.”

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The “Documentary Hypothesis” stems from the German rationalism of the late 1800s and tries to argue that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses but had as many as four authors whose writings were compiled by an unnamed editor.

As my pastor, Richard Jordan, explains, “Back in the early part of the last century there was a great modernist- fundamentalist debate and the modernists had a doctrine called the Graf-Wellhausen theory. It came out of the rationalism in Germany in the late 1800s and said that Moses didn’t write Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and that Moses, in fact, couldn’t write; that he was a dumb cave guy living with these dumb Egyptians and the Pentateuch was really written by four different people much later than Moses. The names they used for the books were J, E, P and D. J stood for the Jehovah passages. P for the Levitical priesthood passages, E for where it talks about Elohim and D for the Deuteronomic passages.

“Well, thankfully, a (research scholar) by the name of Robert Dick Wilson came along and absolutely, completely, conclusively, for all time demolished the Graf-Wellhausen theory (in the early 1900s). He was a Princeton scholar who had the credentials to do so.”

According to Wikipedia, Wilson was a highly respected American linguist and Presbyterian scholar “who made major contributions in verifying the reliability of the Hebrew Bible. In his quest to determine the accuracy of the original manuscripts, Wilson eventually learned 45 languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as well as all the languages into which the Scriptures had been translated up to 600 AD.

“He proved himself an outstanding language student even as an undergraduate. While at Princeton University, he was able to read the New Testament in nine languages. He graduated from Princeton at the age of 20, later receiving a master's degree and doctorate before doing post-graduate work in Germany at the Humboldt University of Berlin. . .

“Throughout his career, he opposed the higher criticism theory, which held that the Bible was inaccurate on many points and not historically reliable. Professor Wilson wrote, ‘I have come to the conviction that no man knows enough to attack the veracity of the Old Testament. Every time when anyone has been able to get together enough documentary [proofs] to undertake an investigation, the biblical facts in the original text have victoriously met the test’ (quoted in R. Pache, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture).”

In addition to Wilson’s work exposing the Graf-Wellhausen theory, Barlow writes that Josh McDowell’s book, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, is the “absolute, top-notch refutation of this so-called ‘higher criticism’ (or as we prefer to call it, ‘pseudo-intellectual drivel’). . . Anyone who has ever been exposed to and confused or disturbed by the ‘Documentary Hypothesis’ should read Mr. McDowell’s work. I can well remember how that volume was used by God to help clear up some lingering, nagging questions which still lurked in the back of my mind.

“This vicious method of denigrating the Holy Scriptures has not only corrupted the viewpoint of many Roman Orthodox and Protestant scholars, its tentacles have also reached into the Jewish religious community. Consequently, the vast majority of Jewish people possess a Bible that for them, (not unlike millions of professing Christians) has no credibility as being the absolute and authoritative foundation of their faith. They say the history of the Bible is not reliable; the miracles are considered incredulous and are dismissed and denied. They are written off as myth or folklore. Even of the Psalms, a fairly innocuous realm of Scripture, Mr. Ausubel says:

‘While it is true that seventy three of the hundred and fifty Psalms carry the name of David as the author, modern biblical scholarship is able to agree on one poem only as being convincingly of Davidic composition. And that one, oddly enough, is not included in the book of Psalms, but in the second book of Samuel where it found its way from the now lost, but ancient book of Yashar. . .’ ”

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What’s funny is that a learned examination of the Book of Psalms reveals that at least a little bit of it was written by Moses! In my Scofield Reference Bible, Psalm 90 even comes with the heading, “A Prayer of Moses the man of God.”

“Both Psalm 90 and 91 were probably written by Moses,” says Jordan. “If you go back sometime and read Deuteronomy 32 and 33, and then read these two psalms, you’ll see phrase and concept after phrase and concept in Deuteronomy 32 and 33 that show up again in Psalm 90 and 91, indicating Moses wrote the two of them.

“By the way, Deuteronomy 32 and 33 is, in the writings of Moses, sort of like what Romans 6 (is in the writings of Paul). Romans 6 is a key passage in the Christian life and, well, Deuteronomy 32 and 33 could be called the national anthem of the nation Israel.

“So, just like the burning bush is the real symbol of the nation Israel (instead of the pagan Star of David, which is really the evil Star of Moloch in Amos 5), if the nation Israel wanted a Bible national anthem, it would be the song Moses sings in Deuteronomy 32 and 33 because that song rehearses the whole of their history. It gives their history prophetically all the way from the time of Moses right to the time of Christ—the first coming, the tribulation and the Second Coming.

“When you look at Psalm 90 and 91, much of the stuff drawn from those passages gives the reader the immediate understanding that, ‘Hey, these psalms have to do with Israel in the last days’; not just Israel in David’s day, or Moses’ day, as in this case, but Israel in the purpose and plan of God ultimately.”